From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 10:06:45 +0100 Dear Rick, I am not sure when university presses mainly published the output of their universities as did learned societies the output of their members but certainly in the past this was their function. What I do know is that part of the success of commercial publishers was due to the fact that these existing publishing organisations were seen as stifling new developments and being in the hands of a relatively narrow group who decided what should be published. I am not saying that this was in fact the case but I can say from experience of someone who has started 100s of new journals in my time that those who came to me with proposals usually if not invariably did so on this basis. These are publishers. It seems to me that the idea that departments should decide who gets funding to pay APCs is much more of a problem. Wearing my academic hat I would suggest that where disbursement of any funds is concerned it is not infrequent that heads of department use their patronage to favour those in their own group. They are the filter. Even Wellcome, who are really generous funders of publications, pass the responsibility downstream to institutions holding grants from them after a period of time. There will have to be selection. I do not think academics in general want their peers or superiors to be the selectors. Like you I am not suggesting that such problems are insuperable. Back in 2002 Raym Crow wrote an extremely lucid explanation of the new publication environment which could be centred on the institutional repositories in his Case for Institutional Repositories - see http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/readings.shtml. The fact that his suggested re-alignment of scholarly communication has not come to pass does not mean the analysis is other than excellent. I have just been teaching a class of students and using his thinking as a starting point. I cannot remember whether he mentions branding Anthony -----Original Message----- From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:50:07 +0000 Isn't this becoming a debate about whether research institutions should take responsibility for publishing the research done by their staff? This is a big shift since, historically, institutions have largely left responsibility for publishing to their research staff. If we accept that institutions need to take over this responsibility from individual staff, then we need to ask the question: will institutions be any good at discharging this responsibility? Another question is whether scholars will trust institutions to perform the kind of branding for their own output that is currently performed by third-party journals. Under the current system, if I publish an article in a prestigious journal, those who see the citation have pretty good reason to expect that my article is of high quality, because the journal publisher has no vested interest in advancing my career. But what if those who see the citation know that the publisher is also my employer? I'm not saying this is an insuperable problem, only that it's one more thing that would have to be considered if we want to get serious about moving in this direction. What it would amount to, really, is institutional self-publishing. Every journal would be seen as, essentially, a vanity press of its institution unless some kind of structurally rigorous discrimination were built into the system. (And what would be the institution's incentive for building such rigor in?) -- Rick Anderson Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah [log in to unmask]